Monday, September 1, 2014

(Crisis Magazine) There is a warm spot in my heart for Sir Cecil
Spring-Rice because he loved Theodore Roosevelt and disdained Woodrow
Wilson. He also wrote the hymn “I Vow to Thee My Country” which
some progressivists have forbidden their shrunken congregations to sing
because it speaks of a real heaven, and a life of sacrifice. He said
affectionately of Teddy: “You must always remember, the president is
about six.” In the instance of his subject, that bespoke an innocent
exuberance which sometimes tottered on the brink of vainglory and
romance, and later led to the disaster of the Bull Moose Party, but
which also impelled the Rough Rider up San Juan Hill (Kettle Hill for
pedants). That was a flourish of innocence, as distinct from naiveté.
For naiveté is to innocence what superstition is to faith, optimism to
hope, and sentimentality to love.

In our day we have witnessed hearty public figures political and
religious, fudging those distinctions and visiting mosques and bantering
as though they were in a Kiwanis club. As they do, Christians are
being killed in foreign lands by the disciples of Mohammed, whom the
politically cautious say has been misunderstood by his extreme
devotees. If that is so, we have yet to hear censure from the more
moderate clients of that enigmatic figure who slaughtered many with his
own sword. Images of Christian infants cut in half and children
beheaded in Iraq, show that Herod is alive, and those of us who wear
crucifixes now can see pictures of young men being crucified, as
warnings that the cross is not an ornament designed by Tiffany for
debutantes.

No civilized human can react with anything but embarrassment
when Nancy Pelosi says on CNN that she has been informed by the Qataris
that Hamas is a “humanitarian agency.” Her grotesque comment was made
as Hamas was using human shields and citing lines from “The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion.” At the same time, the cathedral in Mosul was being
desecrated by the Islamic State and Yezidis were starving on a
mountaintop as a moral descant to Pascal: “Christ is in agony until the
end of the world.”

Agony is not a topic for humor. His century’s master of the English
language, P.G. Wodehouse, recognized as such by T.S. Eliot, Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene and Churchill, broadcast from his internment camp
ambiguous jokes about the Nazi genocide. “Risus abundat in ore
stultorum.” Wodehouse was a gentle naïf, and, while distracted by
golfing, he suffered under a lifelong cloud thereafter until he was
decorated by his Queen who recognized that there was no malice in the
man who never aged from six to manhood. There are those on the public
scene today who do not have his excuse of permanent childhood.

In 1933, an anti-Nazi rally was held in Madison Square Garden where
that noble and underestimated Governor Al Smith declared in his rough
voice and Lower East Side diction, reading from notes written in is own
hand on three envelopes with no recourse to teleprompters: “This fact,
however, remains: That up to the present moment, if we look at the
record, the responsible head of the German Government has said nothing
in denunciation of this conduct.” More cultivated and less informed
personalities like Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson of the London Times and the 9th
Duke of Manchester William Montague gathered at Cliveden, the country
estate of the American expatriate Lady Astor, to mock those who said
that Hitler meant what he said. The Irish journalist, Claud Cockburn, a
Communist Party propagandist, may have caricatured their naiveté but
dangerous it was, and it led to the pathetic incantations of Chamberlain
who flaunted the term “appeasement” as a salutary policy, only to
inherit the fate yet due to those in high places today who treat with
presidents and governors, and then express “disappointment” that those
presidents and governors had lied to them. History will record them
uttering what Captain Renault sputtered in the fiction of film: “I am
shocked. Shocked.”

On September 12, 2006 King Harald of Norway made available documents
showing that the esteemed King Olaf V, as Crown Prince in the 1930s had
urged his wiser father, King Haakon VII, to accommodate the Nazis. Both
eventually fled to London when reality checked in. It was not a proud
moment for the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sondenburg-Glucksburg, and a
high price was exacted from all those who spouted what Chesterton called
“easy speeches that comfort cruel men.” The New York Times, always
eager to let theory trump practice, just as it had let its Moscow
correspondent Walter Duranty defend Stalin, published an assurance from
its Berlin reporter, Frederick T. Birchall, smoothly saying that Hitler
had commanded the Nazi storm troops “to put an immediate stop to acts of
political terror, personal persecutions and interference with private
business.” The result was, according to him, “a visible relaxation of
political tension throughout Germany.”
That 1933 New York rally was succeeded in 1939 by another in the same
arena, when 22,000 pro-Nazis, inspired by figures including the
universal hero, Charles Lindbergh, whom the world thought could slow the
rise of the oceans and heal the planet, boasted that the enemy was not
an enemy. They spoke under a large picture of George Washington who,
they said, was one of them because he was an Aryan. A grave in Mount
Vernon must have rattled, but ideology has no patience for fact.

Today, the weaker voices who place politics above prophecy and
popularity above the people, may say as some Frenchmen in the 1930s,
understandably weary of war, said as they looked the other way, “We will
not die for Danzig.” Bombs and shrapnel soon spelled out that Danzig
was a cipher for all humanity.

If a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, a great
prophet is not without honor save in the whole world. Pope Benedict
XVI bent under that mantle in 2006 when he spoke in Regensburg. His
only miscalculation was to assume that civilization might still be civil
enough to respect reason. Quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel II
Paleologus, himself a remnant of a decaying civilization which still
distinguished good from evil, he considered how the Islamic notion of a
divine power divorced from reason, whose absolute will is its own
justification, could ransack the dignity of man. He condemned no one,
and spoke only for truth without which the votaries of unreason, for
whom there is no moral structure other than the willfulness of
amorality, and whose God is not bound by his own word, rain down
destruction.

The response of some, who protested with violence, proved by that
very violence the Regensburg hypothesis, if the Incarnate Christ whose
word is truth, can be called a hypothesis. Pope Benedict said:
“Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the
soul…. God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary
to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would
lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason
properly, without violence and threats.… To convince a reasonable soul,
one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other
means of threatening a person with death….”

Later, the distinguished Egyptian Jesuit scholar, Father Shamir Halil
Shamir, wrote: “Benedict XVI is probably one of the few figures to
have profoundly understood the ambiguity in which
contemporary Islam is
being debated and its struggle to find a place in modern society. At the
same time, he is proposing a way for Islam to work toward coexistence
globally and with religions, based not on religious dialogue, but on
dialogue between cultures and civilizations based on rationality and on a
vision of man and human nature which comes before any ideology or
religion. This choice to wager on cultural dialogue explains his
decision to absorb the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue
into the larger Pontifical Council for Culture.”

The president of Argentina, the problematic Christina Kirchner, said
that the Pope’s remarks were a “diatribe” and “dangerous for everyone.”
A supporter of Kirchner, the left-wing “investigative journalist”
Horatio Verbitsky, adept as a conspiracy theorist, claimed in the
journal “Pagina/24″ that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, at that time
archbishop of Buenos Aires, had distanced himself from the Regensburg
address, and the cardinal’s spokesman, Father Guillermo Marco, was
quoted in Newsweek Argentina as saying that Bergoglio was “unhappy” with what Pope Benedict had said. The London Daily Telegraph made the same claim with nothing more substantial than the article in Newsweek Argentina.
It is the case that another Argentinian archbishop, Joaquin Pina,
criticized the Regensburg thesis, four days after which the Holy See
accepted his resignation, but he already was one year past retirement
age.

These few years since have seen written in the suffering of
distressed souls what Pope Benedict described calmly and charitably.
Such a short time can sharpen perceptions, and Pope Francis, whom we are
assured is close to Benedict, has recently said from his humble abode:
“The news coming from Iraq leaves us with dismay and disbelief.”
Consequently, the Holy See conceded that military action may be needed
to stem the atrocities of the Islamic State of Iraq. Only time will
tell if that is a day late and a dollar short. Pythagoras’s belief
that history repeats itself is a notion contrary to Christian progress,
but all history attests that mistakes can repeat themselves, and the
only way out of that fatal trap is to admit error and make amends. Both
Benedict and Francis continue to grace the world with their obedience to
the Logos. Should the God of Love call Benedict first to his
heavenly home where humility’s only advertisement is the peace which
passes all understanding, may Francis or another successor of
Peter, declare Benedict a Doctor of the Church. Of one thing we may be
certain: like the bold prophet Jeremiah, the benign prophet Benedict
will never say in this world or from the next, “I told you so.” Reality
has said that already by events more than words.

“How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can? But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death.”- Pope Benedict XVI

"This past Wednesday I was in part of the hospital that was devoted to people who have memory problems like my father. The people here may have no idea who I am but they light up at the sight of a collar. People who cannot carry on a conversation click “on” and join in prayer as if there were little wrong with them, their faces relaxing in this moment of peace amidst the chaos of illness."- Fr. Valencheck

"The priest's life is not his own. He does not live it for himself and his personal fulfillment, but for the salvation of souls."- Fr. Richtsteig

"I am convinced that if we simply follow the liturgical books, say the texts and carry out the gestures properly, in a style continuous with our tradition, the Church’s liturgy has power the capture minds and hearts and transform them.

I starting forming this conviction before I became a Catholic through my experience of Novus Ordo Masses done in an entirely Roman traditional style, closely following the books.

The late Msgr. Richard Schuler would eventually articulate to me in words what I was experiencing in the church. "Just do what the Council asked… do what the Church asks."

Why is worship well executed according to the mind of the Church so effective?

Christ is the true Actor in the sacred action of the Church’s worship. He makes our hands and voices His own as He raises our petitions and offerings to the Father for His glory and our salvation.

Christ’s Holy Church has determined the way by which we may have this encounter with mystery in the liturgy, be taken up in the sacred action.

Although we have the right to our Rite celebrated as the Church desires, liturgy is not about me or us or even you in the pews." - Fr. Zuhlsdorf

"After celebrating Mass facing the Lord I can report these favorable effects from the priest's point of view:

1. I don't have to worry about where to look
2. I don't have to worry about what my face looks like
3. I can weep at the beauty and wonder of it all without concern
4. I can worship more freely and fully
5. I feel more at one with the people of God
6. I am on a journey to God with the people
7. I am not the focus of attention
8. The elevation of the host and the Ecce Agnus Dei have become more of a focus
9. I feel more part of the great tradition
10. I can't see who's not paying attention and feel I have to do something to get their attention back." - Fr. Longenecker

"My rector in Denver, when he was a young priest, was eating dinner at his secretary's house, a widow from Sicily. Thinking he was polite he said, 'If you wish you can call me Michael.' She stopped, put her hand on her hip, and, pointing at him with her wooden spoon, said, 'Don't think I call you Father because I think you're better than me! I call you Father to remind you who you're supposed to be and how you're going to be judged by our Lord!' He passes that lesson on to all his seminarians."- Fr. Andrew

Decalogue Against Temptation

1. Do not forget that the devil exists.
2. Do not forget that the devil is a tempter.
3. Do not forget that the devil is very intelligent and astute.
4. Be vigilant concerning your eyes and heart. Be strong in spirit and virtue.
5. Believe firmly in the victory of Christ over the tempter.
6. Remember that Christ makes you a participant in His victory.
7. Listen carefully to the word of God.
8. Be humble and love mortification.
9. Pray without flagging.
10. Love the Lord your God and offer worship to Him only.